Wednesday, May 18, 2022

The Five or Six Year Wager


Every time I hear another Never Trumper launch into another !Shocking!Discovery! of some horrifying aspect of the Right that Liberals have been warning about for decades, I make this little wager with myself.

That whatever the awfulness is and however endemic it has been on the Right since at least the Age of Reagan, the Never Trumper who is coming to terms with the !Shocking!Discovery!   is definitely gonna confine the phenomenon to the period after they were run out of the GOP.  In other words, none of this is their fault because no one could've seen this coming because everything monstrous about the Right happened suddenly and inexplicably  "over the last five or six years".

Which brings us to this conversation between Tim Alberta and Charlie Sykes ("Tim Alberta: The Poisoning of the Evangelical Church") , out of which I have parcelled these quotes and added emphasis where I want your eyes to alight.

Right out of the box, Charlie Sykes begins with...

Sykes:  ...this is a tough piece to wrestle with.  I'll be honest with you because, y'know,  it's... it's one of the things that I will admit that I have had the hardest time understanding over the last ... and now it's you know going on five, six years.  The transformation of the Christian church.  The, y'know, white evangelical churches.  And what your piece suggests is that whatever has happened to them seems to be accelerating and that that's difficult to get your head around...

And then we're off to the races: 

Alberta:  I've had this conversation over and over and over again with pastors and with church leader types and just with everyday church-goers over the past year while i've been doing all this reporting. And for all of the disruption and volatility of the previous five, six years you know Trump's presidency obviously..

Alberta:  what he's seen happen over the last four or five years is that all of these really ugly and intense and polarizing debates over politics and policy and you know culture and social...

Alberta: ...what you've seen here really over the past five years it traces back a bit further, but it's really intensified here over the last five years.

Sykes:  ... I think this is important because there will be people who say, "Well nothing's new. That's always been this way."  No, um, this is in fact new the last five years.  Let's talk about Donald Trump...

Two things.

First, it is impossible for me to ever trust "allies" like Charlie Sykes who lie so easily, automatically and declaratively about their own past and trajectory their party has been on for decades, and who regularly blame Liberals for the miserable shitpile of bigots and imbeciles their Republican party has become.   

Second, Never Trumpers repeat their bullshit, self-absolving "the last four or five year" mantra so incessantly that if my little wagers with myself had been actual wagers, by now I'd have amassed enough of a money pile to buy MSNBC outright and turn it into an actual Liberal media powerhouse.

Until then...



I Am The Liberal Media

4 comments:

Ian said...

I had forgotten those goons (Falwell and Roberts) had claimed god had a curtain that protected America from terrorists that he decided to let fall down because of how angry he was that we allowed gay people to exist.

Good times.

Farmergreg said...

My first comment! So excited... Do you happen to have Charlie Sykes's address? I need to send him Frederick Douglass's "Narrative..." with a sticky note marking the Appendix in which Mr. Douglass absolutely crushes the South's version of Christianity. He wrote it in 1845. So I need to tell Sykes to add 171 or 172 years to his puny "5 or 6."
Thanks, and keep up the good work.
Farmergreg

driftglass said...

Welcome Farmergreg

Anonymous said...

I suggest spending a few moments a week thinking of the future. Wrap your mind around a General Strike.

That is all.